Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.
On the Mount Vernon website, there is a page titled “Give Me Liberty: African Americans in the Revolutionary War.” The page lists stories of several African Americans and their roles in the war. The page ends like this, “A Leader’s Evolution: “George Washington’s views on slavery changed during the Revolutionary War. Why?”
- He saw 5,000 black soldiers fight bravely for the American cause.
- Abolitionist aides (such as the Marquis de Lafayette, John Laurens, and Alexander Hamilton) exposed him to moral arguments against slavery.
- His plantation grew less profitable, leading him to question the economic value of slavery.
“After the war, Washington grew critical of slavery and conflicted about being a slaveowner. He eventually used his will to emancipate the enslaved people he owned,” (from African Americans in the Revolutionary War | George Washington’s Mount Vernon).
His will: He apparently could not fathom living without those he enslaved. As our Time for All Ages noted, the only enslaved person who became free at his death was Billy Lee. The other enslaved would not be free, according to his will, until the death of his wife.
Washington was willing to change his views only so far. He was not willing to change so far as to inconvenience his own way of life.
In a February 6 article for The Philadelphia Tribune by Sherry Stone, titled “The nine enslaved: Recalling those who toiled for George Washington at the President’s House,” she tells the stories recently removed from The President’s House.
At least two of those Washington enslaved at the President’s House in Philadelphia self-emancipated. Stone writes of Ona Marie Judge, “According to the Library of Congress and a book by Erica Armstrong-Dunbar, Ona was responsible for drawing Martha Washington’s bath, preparing her clothing, brushing the first lady’s hair, tending to her when she was ill and traveling with her on social calls.
“Ona disappeared while the Washingtons were sitting down to dinner. A $10 reward was offered for her return, in a newspaper advertisement that read: ‘She may attempt to escape by water. All matter of vessels and others are cautioned against receiving her onboard … She will probably endeavor to pay as for a free woman—and it is said that she has the wherewithal to pay her passage. Ten dollars will be paid to any person (white or black) who will bring her home, if taken in the city, or aboard a vessel in the harbor. And a further reasonable sum, if apprehended and brought home—for a greater difference and in proportion to the defiance.’
“According to ‘Timeless: Stories from the Library of Congress,’ Ona ran away when she learned that she was to be given away as a wedding present to the first lady’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Parke Custis Law.
“Ona, whose mother was interracial and whose father was a white English tailor, was nearly captured two years later, but she fled with her infant child when she received a warning. She somehow made her way to New Hampshire where she married a free Black sailor named Jack Staines and had three children.
“She lived the rest of her life as a free woman, according to Mount Vernon historians. During an 1845 interview with the ‘Anti-Slavery Bugle’ newspaper, Ona, was quoted as saying that she just ‘wanted to be free,’” (from The nine enslaved: Recalling those who toiled for George Washington at the President’s House | Local News | phillytrib.com).
The other who self-emancipated was named Hercules. Stone writes of him, “He served as a cook for the Washington family and was charged with preparing elaborate dinners for the first family.
“Hercules started as an 11-year-old errand boy who worked in the kitchen and was also a chimneysweeper. He eventually served the Washington family in Philadelphia with his own son, Richmond, whose siblings Evey, 8, and Delia, 5, remained in Virginia at Mount Vernon.
“Washington was surprised when Hercules ran away on the president’s birthday on Feb. 22, while he was assigned to lay bricks.
“Hercules was never found and he was believed to have escaped using money tucked away from the approved sale of ‘leftover slops’ from the Washington family’s dinner table.
“Hercules is believed to have run away to New York and lived there for 15 years until he died in May 1812. Records show he was buried at the Second African Burial Ground in Manhattan, New York,” (from The nine enslaved: Recalling those who toiled for George Washington at the President’s House | Local News | phillytrib.com).
A nephew of Billy Lee was one of the other enslaved people the Washingtons brought to Philadelphia. Stone writes of Christopher Sheels, “He was the son of an enslaved spinner at the Washington’s Farm House. Sheels had eight siblings and was close to his uncle William Lee who was Washington’s former manservant.
“Sheels later became Washington’s sole attendant in Philadelphia, for a brief time. According to records, Sheels was literate and was able to read and write.
“The president may have been concerned he would learn about the 1780 Gradual Abolition Laws that legally set slaves free, in Philadelphia after a six-month residency requirement.
“In September 1791, Washington sent Sheels back to Virginia, from Pennsylvania, permanently,” (from The nine enslaved: Recalling those who toiled for George Washington at the President’s House | Local News | phillytrib.com).
Washington kept people enslaved, though the Mount Vernon website says, “He saw 5,000 black soldiers fight bravely for the American cause.”
That is probably an undercount. The Wikipedia article on African Americans in the Revolutionary War says, “Between 220,000 and 250,000 soldiers and militia served the American cause in total, suggesting that Black soldiers made up approximately four percent of the Patriots’ numbers. Of the 9,000 Black soldiers, 5,000 were combat-dedicated troops. The average length of time in service for an African American soldier during the war was four and a half years (due to many serving for the whole eight-year duration), which was eight times longer than the average period for white soldiers. Meaning that while they were only four percent of the manpower base, they comprised around a quarter of the Patriots’ strength in terms of man-hours, though this includes supportive roles…. American states had to meet quotas of troops for the new Continental Army, and New England regiments recruited Black enslaved people by promising freedom to those who served in the Continental Army. During the course of the war, about one-fifth of the men in the northern army were Black. At the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, Baron Closen, a German officer in the French Royal Deux-Ponts Regiment, estimated about one-quarter of the American army to be Black men,” (from African Americans in the Revolutionary War – Wikipedia).
In a Wikipedia article on George Washington and slavery, it says of Washington, “As commander-in-chief of the Continental Army in 1775, he initially refused to accept African-Americans, free or enslaved, into the ranks, but bowed to the demands of war, and thereafter led a racially integrated army. In 1778, Washington expressed moral aversion to selling some of his enslaved workers at a public venue or splitting their families. [But] At war’s end, Washington demanded without success that the British respect the preliminary peace treaty which he said required return of all escaped slaves,” (from George Washington and slavery – Wikipedia).
The British had promised freedom to the enslaved who fought for them. They kept that promise. Many of those former enslaved were moved to Nova Scotia and to London after the war not returned to former owners, (from African Americans in the Revolutionary War – Wikipedia).
Wikipedia notes, “Politically, Washington felt that the divisive issue of American slavery threatened national cohesion; he never spoke publicly about it even in his speeches addressing the new nation’s challenges, and he signed laws that protected slavery as well as laws that curtailed slavery. In Pennsylvania, he worked around the technicalities of state laws with his personal enslaved population so as to not lose them.
“Privately, Washington considered freeing his enslaved population in the mid-1790s. Those plans failed because of his inability to raise the finances he deemed necessary, the refusal of his family to approve emancipation of the dower slaves (those that had come into the family with his marriage to Martha), and his aversion to splitting the many families that included both dower slaves and his own slaves. By the time of Washington’s death in 1799 there were 317 enslaved people at Mount Vernon. 124 were owned outright by Washington, 40 were rented, and the remainder were dower slaves owned by the estate of Martha Washington’s first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, on behalf of their grandchildren. Washington’s will was widely published upon his death, and provided for the eventual emancipation of the enslaved population owned by him, one of the few slave-owning founders to do so. He could not legally free the dower slaves, and so the will said that except for his valet William Lee who was freed immediately, his enslaved workers were bequeathed to his widow Martha until her death. She felt unsafe amidst slaves whose freedom depended on her demise, and freed them in 1801,” (from George Washington and slavery – Wikipedia).
What a complicated story. What machinations on the part of Washington. This is not the story of an unblemished American first President. But the desire for an unblemished story seems to be what is behind the removing of some of this story from our monuments and historical sites.
Though Washington had qualms about enslaving people, he offered rewards for those who ran and delayed freeing those he enslaved until after his death. As the Christian Bible says, “The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.”
How willing are we to change when the change we know we should make is going to cost us, maybe cost us dearly?
Which stories will help us more in our choices, the whitewashed stories of our ancestors or their full unredacted stories revealing all their faults and struggles? I am inclined to think it is the full stories.
If we think only the perfect can ever get to the point of doing what is right, what hope can we have in ourselves or our current leaders?
This week one of you emailed a piece by Liz Bucar for “Religion, Reimagined.” It ended, with a small redaction naming a particular party, like this, “People don’t lack information about … policy proposals. They lack trust that any politician will actually deliver. The erosion of trust in politics mirrors, maybe even feeds off of, the erosion of trust in religious institutions.
“But here’s what I wonder: If we strip away religious frameworks entirely, what’s left to train people in costly, sustained trust? What teaches you to hold hope through disappointment? What gives you practice believing transformation is possible when every piece of evidence says otherwise?
“I genuinely don’t know,” (from What If Trevor Noah Is Right About the Left and Religion?).
Washington enjoined others to “observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all.” He said, “Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it?” But as noted earlier, he signed laws that protected slavery as well as laws that curtailed slavery. He didn’t fully follow his own words, his own faith.
A few minutes after I read the article by Bucar, I read this week’s “Braver/Wiser” email from the UUA, this week written by Rev. Lauren Smith. She said this in her essay:
“I am the grateful beneficiary of my ancestors’ imagination. Their courage blesses my life and the lives of my children.
“My great-great-grandparents lived in Wilmington, NC during the waning days of slavery, the pressure cooker years before the start of the Civil War. They were free Black people, but their freedom was limited by law and circumstance. Their relative freedom depended on the passes they carried and the whims of the White people among whom they lived. Free Black people could be re-enslaved for modest infractions, real or imagined. They lived on a knife’s edge.
“This was the only reality they had ever known, the only place they had ever lived. The world beyond Wilmington must have felt like a great, unfathomable void, the edge of the earth on world maps drawn before people discovered the earth was round.
“Despite this uncertainty and danger, they opened to the possibility of a different future. They packed up, picked up and moved on. They made the treacherous journey north to Oberlin, Ohio, then continued east to New England. Moving north of the Mason-Dixon line didn’t mean full access to the rights of citizenship, but it did open new doors of opportunity, and they chose to move through those doors.
“William A. Hazel, the first Unitarian in my family, was a Black man born in the South before the abolition of slavery. As an adult, he attended the First Parish in Cambridge, MA. His life was a liberation journey, seeded by imagination and fed by courage, blessing the all of us who came after.
“A century and a half later, I hope that my practice of Unitarian Universalism will also be a liberation journey, imaginative and brave. I pray that my journey will forge pathways of possibility for my three children—who are now eighteen, fifteen, and ten years old—and for the generations who follow.
“Spirit of love and freedom, teach me to imagine the impossible so that it may become possible. Help me to risk unfurling into something new, so that the lives of my children and their children may be blessed and expanded.”
To Washington, the world beyond depending on the enslaved “must have felt like a great, unfathomable void, the edge of the earth on world maps drawn before people discovered the earth was round.” He had inherited his first slaves at the age of eleven. He had a hard time stepping into that void, but something, perhaps faith, perhaps a sense of what was right, kept pushing him. His own story as well as the stories of those he enslaved can inform and embolden us as we too struggle to do what we know is right.
Rev. Michelle Collins wrote:
“Come to this time of worship… worn, weary, or wide awake.
In this gathering, we acknowledge the pressure of living,
the tender ache of persisting through uncertainty,
the courage of continuing when clarity is distant.
Yet here we are, still breathing, still reaching, still becoming.
Today, let us embody resilience together,
not as armor,
but as the soft, stubborn practice
of returning to ourselves,
to one another,
to the work of love.”
Changing our minds and our lives takes courage. With some of us, like with Washington, it takes time. But let his story remind us not to give up trying. Though we too may fail over and over again, let us continue to be willing to return to ourselves and to try again, and perhaps we will succeed in our efforts sooner than he did.
Chalice Extinguishing
words by Erik Walker Wikstrom
If you are who you were,
and if the person next to you is who he or she was,
if none of us has changed
since the day we came in here—
we have failed.
The purpose of this community—
of any church, temple, zendo, mosque—
is to help its people grow.
We do this through encounters with the unknown—in ourselves,
in one another,
in “The Other”—whoever that might be for us,
however hard that might be—
because these encounters have many gifts to offer.
So may you go forth from here this morning
not who you were,
but who you could be.
So may we all.
Benediction
words by George Washington
“As (hu)Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.”
If you’ve appreciated this sermon, please visit our Give Now page to support the UUCSH Share the Plate efforts to assist those in need.